At Freedom's Limit

The subject of this book is a new "Islam." This Islam begins to disclose its shape in 1988 around the Rushdie Affair, the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the first Gulf War of 1991. It is consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. This "Islam" is a name, a discursive site, a flexible and simultaneously constrained signifier, indeed a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism and Reformation are worked out. In the formation that has clustered at this site there are for Islam many metonyms: the veiled or "pious" Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question "how do we free ourselves from freedom?" Again and again freedom is imagined as western, modern, imperial, a dark imposition of enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his and her own enslavement is imagined as freedom's other. At Freedom's Limit shows how this Islam draws upon a colonial history of the reorganization of religion, even repeats it in the former metropolises of Empire but works also to erase that colonial genealogy. It draws upon, and in some cases, continues the Cold War exacerbation and exploitation of the colonial reorganization and stabilization of religion, culture and identities. As a conceptual object it exists most powerfully in the circuits of the Western academy, where it is increasingly a crucial node in the current academic debates invested in reimagining secularism. This book provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. At Freedom's Limit shows that even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, At Freedom's Limit shows that the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed and perpetuated are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters.